‘Meet the Mentors’ Episode 5, with Jared Shurin

The ‘Meet the Mentors’ series is back with another great episode. Hype’s newest recruit and Account Assistant, Helene Bentsen, joins us as guest host this week – seems as if the whole office wants in on the podcasting action. Make sure you check out this episode, and the rest of the series, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud and more.

This week, we delve into the world of strategy within advertising, with the Strategy Director of M&C Saatchi World Services, Jared Shurin. We discuss the strategy, big agency vs small agency culture, and navigating the advertising space.

We begin as Jared explains both his role as Strategy Director, and exactly what strategy is. He describes it in relatively simple terms, as a way to “turn a business problem into a communications problem”, however understands that achieving this is an incredible feat.

Seeing as strategy is a field that may don’t enter through a linear career path, it’s difficult to know where to begin if strategy is your end goal. We touch on how multitudes of people got into the industry and which qualities in people were necessary for their roles, before the candidates understood their job descriptions. We also tackle the interview process and exactly how young people trying to break into advertising should view it.

We also get into agency culture and how it differs in a big agency such as M&C Saatchi, to other smaller agencies, and how this affects the hiring process. This inevitably means we touch on what agency culture actually is, and how it has become monotonised due to a repeated lack of diversity and inclusion in the creative industries – a necessary topic of discussion.

We spoke about so much more on this amazing episode, so be sure to listen and share with your networks.

To keep up with all that Jared is doing, be sure to follow him on Twitter. To keep up-to-date with all Hype Collective Podcast episodes, and more amazing content we create, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram, and like our page on Facebook.

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